New!March 26, 2012: VM Guest tools contains scripts and drivers that are used to create virtualized machine images in SmartOS.

In SmartOS, virtual machines are created using the vmadm create tool. This tool takes a JSON payload and creates either a 'kvm' or 'joyent' brand zone with the properties specified in the input JSON. Normal output is a series of single-line JSON objects with type set to one of:

success

failure

update

notice

each object having at least the 'type' and 'message' fields. A message of type 'success' or 'failure' will be followed by the process exiting with the exit status 0 indicating success and all other exits indicating failure.

Getting Started

The Machine JSON Description

Save the code snippet below to a file called "vmspec.json". You can make changes to the networks and other variables as appropriate. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all options. For all options see vmadm(1m). (Sizes are listed in MiB)

For releases before December 15, 2011, you will need to include the default_gateway attribute in the root:

This must match the gateway of one of the nics so that the default gateway and resolvers will be set via DHCP in the VM.

When installing OS's that do not ship with virtio support instead of using virtio on the disk for the model use ide and e1000 for the network model.

Create the Empty Virtual Machine

Create the empty virtual machine using the create-machine tool. Please note that the virtual machine will not be running.

Note the UUID in the last step. This UUID is the ID of the VM and will be used to reference it for the rest of its lifecycle.

Copy your OS ISO to the zone

Ensure permissions are correct on the ISO

Boot the VM from the ISO Image

vmadm is the virtual machine administration tool. It is used to manage the lifecycle of a virtual machine after it already exists. We will boot the virtual machine we have just created, but tell it to boot off of the ISO image the first time it comes up.

Please note that the path for the ISO image will be the relative path of the ISO to the zone you are in. This is why it starts with the '/'

Use VNC to Connect to the VM

The vmadm tool can print out the information on the VM. You can also append a section to print specificially.

Your VM is now running. You can shutdown your virtual machine and it will still remain on disk. To learn more about managing the lifecycle of a virtual machine, run vmadm --help.

I am having some issue's setting up multiple VM's on smartos. The problem is that whenever I try to boot up a VM with one already running I get the following in my /var/adm/messages:

I have looked high and low for any documentation pertaining to networking setup for VM's and haven't been able to find anything as of yet. Is there documentation somewhere where I would be able to find out how to assign VM's virtual nics? I attempted to add additional vnics with:

This created the vnic, however I cannot figure out how to assign a VM to use that vnic instead of net0. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I attempted to boot a second vm and the following is what I am still seeing:

Also:

So it appears that a single KVM is working correctly, however I am unable to get a second to boot. I suppose that I could try some of the Joynet datasets and see if I get a different result. I also tried to set the /etc/zones/57f55e19-253f-4d98-baf8-7ebab4af17c7.xml to:

EDIT:

and it produced the same output in syslog. I then tried by creating a net1 vnic and it still wouldn't boot. Is there another log somewhere were there may be additional info? I haven't found anything just yet.